Archives for October 2018

Last night I listened to Chris Mathews’ Townhall Meeting with Beto O’Rourke at the University Of Houston. This was a real townhall meeting, not the phony kind that the Republicans have been pulling. By that I mean people got to ask Beto questions directly. In the “townhalls” that Dave Brat has held (and I’ve been to all of them) you don’t get to ask him questions directly. Rather, you get to submit them on a 3”x5” card and then someone chooses which one he’ll answer. In that way he gets to one) not answer difficult questions and two) not be directly confronted by a voter telling him he didn’t answer the question.

O’Rourke took question after question from the audience. He was authentic. He was genuine. He got asked all the questions I would have expected to be asked and more. He didn’t duck a single question. He didn’t blame others. His was a message of inclusiveness, of “we are better than that.” I haven’t heard anyone that inspiring since Bobby Kennedy.

He said he campaigned in every county in Texas, because he intends to represent everyone in Texas. Boy, what a breathe of fresh air.

This is the same message that Stacy Abrams is making in Georgia and Abigail Spanberger is making here in Virginia. They campaign throughout their respectivepolitical area. They say Republican, Democrat, or Independent if elected they will represent you – everyone.

Compare this to The Republican messaging: there is a caravan of invaders coming, we must stop the liberal agenda of Nancy Pelosi, they will raise your taxes, they will allow terrorists into the country, they must be stopped.

Dave Brat is so fearful of his own constituents that he does not let people know where he is going to be for fear of being confronted (“paid protestors!”) Abigail Spanberger has held over one hundred and thirty meet and greets since she’s been campaigning. Dave? Zero. Abigail has real policies laid out on her website. You can go read what she stands for and what she will do. Dave? Not so much. There are vague statements and lies.

When I went to the debate between the two the thing that got me was the way Brat tried to slide stuff by. He has voted repeatedly to get rid of coverage for pre-existing conditions in health care plans. Yet at the debate he said something vague about pre-existing conditions. If I understood him correctly, what he said was you would have more money in your pocket so you could pay for whatever pre-existing condition you had.

My wife’s health care costs went up 500% this year. The insurance plan she picked she did so because it covered medicine she needs. Halfway through the year the insurance company stopped covering that medicine. They are allowed to do that. Are you allowed to switch medical plans? No.

Brat has said that he wants more competition for medical health care plans in Virginia. Of course, he omits the fact that he and his Republican colleagues sat on their hands for as long as they could about various coverage options based on the ACA prompting one of the biggest providers of health care plans in Virginia to pull out and thus limit the options people had, which in turn drove up health care premiums. This was all part of their plan “to let Obamacare fail” instead of strengthening it, which they had been begged to do.

“We will let it fail on its own and then bring in people who know what they are doing and start from scratch,” is what they kept saying. Who exactly they would bring in was never made clear, and they did everything they could to try and force the ACA to look bad. It’s interesting that the things they said they didn’t like about the plan were the things they insisted be put into the legislation.

Spanberger supports the idea of using the bureaucracy already in place for Medicare for people to use and pay for when they can’t get good medical insurance. This is what Brat and the Republicans think is so bad.

The Woman

The Republicans and their right wing buddies been listening to each other so much they believe what they are saying is true and more incredibly that it is what people want. All of a sudden an election is coming up and they have discovered that people like, really like, the idea in Obamacare that folks get covered for their pre-existing conditions (you know like pregnancy). What to do? No problem. Lie. You were for pre-existing conditions all along. As long as you are in office you will make sure pre-existing conditions are covered. Those votes you took specifically against that? Don’t pay any attention to that. (Of course, you won’t be asked that question because you never meet with your constituents.)

Sorry got distracted. What I wanted to talk about was what O’Rourke, Spanberger, and Abrams are all saying and doing. They are saying they want to represent everyone in their area, not a few or a narrow slice.

I remember when this started to change. It started with Reagan. He made it clear he wasn’t representing everyone. He went after unions. He started to change the rules so that certain folks would benefit more than others. I don’t remember exactly when the next step happened but I remember when I heard on the radio that lobbying was made legal. That you’d have to register if you were a lobbyist. I though at the time that would be a good thing because we’d know who they were. What I didn’t realize was that there would be an explosion of influence peddlers. It was at about that time that Microsoft, who had stayed away from government, decided it needed to get involved.

I find it amusing that Paul Ryan makes everyone in his lily white staff read Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead: not realizing that he and his colleagues are doing the exact things that Rand was so opposed to, and that is getting government to change the rules so that you could cheat your competitors.

The next thing that happened was Newt Gingrich. Cameras were put in the House chamber and Newt used it to go on camera and rail against the Democrats. People didn’t realize that most of the time no one was in the chamber. Newt used this to gain notoriety and for the first time in decades the Republicans took control of the House and immediately started to dismantle the government. Newt’s mantra was a scorched earth policy, no compromise. Grover Norquist gained influence. He wanted everyone to make a pledge that they wouldn’t raise taxes. If they did he went after them in elections to get rid of them.

Norquist’s idea was that if you could reduce the size of government to next to nothing then great things would happen. (Could never quite follow the logic there.)

At the same time all this was going on the evangelicals were getting more of a voice. They have this idea that Jesus will come again, and there will be an apocalypse, and we’ll all be taken up to heaven by the lord. Great. What if it doesn’t happen? “You gotta believe!” Sorry. No.

However, this belief and folks like Nancy Reagan who, like Hitler, believed in fortune tellers and charlatans have led our country astray.

In the backdrop of all this are the very rich super conservative who want to eliminate taxes and keep all their wealth. They see taxes as a way to rob them of their hard earned money. The fact that many of them didn’t earn it but inherited it, doesn’t matter. The only thing they want the Federal Government to do is to protect them form foreigners or the raging mob that might show up at their door. Otherwise, they want to have government at the state level where it’s easier to control. They can use the state government to put down local uppity town counsels and the like. Take Flint Michigan as an example.

I am hopefully, silly me, that we are seeing the end of this kind of politics and that we will elect politicians who want to represent all of us. Heck, then maybe we’ll look at real problems and try to solve them.

I know. I know it’s a big ask.

Fortunately, our president has sent 14,200 people trained in how to kill people to our southern border to stop the ragtag group of people nine hundred miles away who are seeking asylum from the terror, violence, killing, rape, and robbery in their home countries. What could go wrong? Beto pointed out that the last time we did this sort of thing a young boy got shot in the back because the military is not trained what to do. Oh. Bummer.

Meanwhile, the president is trying to redefine words.

Sorry, Donald. As Andrew Gillum said of his opponent, “I’m not saying you are a racist. Racists say you are a racist.” The word “Globalists” is used to mean “Jews.” The word “Nationalist” is used to mean “White Nationalist.” You can claim not to know this but all you have to do is to ask your son Eric. He seems to visit sites of White Supremacists or at least he repeats their memes, slogans, and sayings. You’ll find it there Donald – Trust me.

I hope this election will return people who want to represent all of us. I hope the decisive, scorched earth policies of the far right that have been brewing for so long are finally coming to an end. I hope.

We now have three incidents within the last month all of which are directly attributable to our president’s behavior:
The murder of a Washington Post reporter by Saudi Arabia in Istanbul because the president said the press is the enemy of the people,
The sending of pipebombs to people the president has continually verbally attacked at his rallies,
The murder of eleven people at a synagogue due to the president saying there’s a caravan coming to invade this country.

You can spin this anyway you want but what’s very clear is that the president’s attitude and remarks have consequences and we are seeing those consequences play out on the world stage, in our nation, and in our neighborhoods.

There is a lot of fear. Most of it stoked by the president and his allies. There was a period of a few hours when people said the president acted presidential when he read lifelessly from a teleprompter. Then hours later he was back at one of his rallies saying the same old stuff. He thought he was being presidential because for a while he wasn’t screaming it like he normally does. Now “Lock Her Up” or “Lock Him Up” are standard rhetoric at his rallies.

What has this president accomplished since he has been in office:
– He has either not filled many jobs in the government leaving agencies and bureaus wondering what direction to take or,
– Positions he has filled have been either people with no experience and no interest in the job, or by people who want to destroy or privatize the very agency they were put in charge of,
– He has pulled us out of treaties around the world, thus leaving us smaller and weaker,
– He has met with despots and dictators and has an affinity for them, which has emboldened them to act in ways detrimental to the U.S. and why shouldn’t they? They know he won’t stop them.
– He has attacked our allies: politically, economically, and diplomatically,
– He has encouraged violence and hatred not only at home but abroad,
– He has filled many open judgeships with not conservative but far right leaning judges. That legacy will be with us for decades to come.
– He has demonstrated a lack of understanding of diplomacy and competency when it comes to being president and he has demonstrated time and time again that he has no interest in learning.
– He has passed tax cuts that help the 1% but also the one tenth of the 1% more than anyone else. I’m talking like over 80% of the cut going to those individuals. The individuals who need it the least.
– He has indebted our nation to the tune of trillions of dollars.
– He has put in place tariffs with our trading partners the short term effects we are beginning to see in the rapid decline of the stock market.

And yet there are those who think “I’ll stick with him.” When I’ve asked why I get attacked, pointed to silly right wing websites, or I get nothing.

The Republicans still have a chance to pull this election out of the bag. Voter suppression may not be enough. They may turn to outright cheating as has been reported in several states already. It seems easy enough to do because they did nothing to protect our election system.

We have a chance. It is a slim one. To vote them out of office.

VOTE VOTE VOTE

Your life may very well depend on it.

( 7 days til the election. Vote early or get to your polling place on the 6th. If you live in N.C., Kansas, Georgia, or any of the swing states try to vote early. You may have been “purged” via dirty tricks by Republicans in those states.)

Hate crimes in America are up over 50 percent this year. What a surprise! The weird thing is that few if any are caused by anyone other than older white men. Men filled with rage. Do we have anyone in our midst that is a leader filled with rage?

Case closed.

I could go on, but why?

The Republican guy in charge of their ads, the ads attacking George Soros, the ones they ran even after the synagogue was attacked, he said that they aren’t responsible for the content per se, they outsource that and besides it’s okay because to some degree the ad is truthful about Soros, or some such nonsense.

We aren’t halfway through this presidency and the country has gone to shit.

It’s amazing how fast it can happen isn’t it?

Putin is claiming America is in decline and Trump is the big reason why.

We’ve been pulled out of economic, diplomatic, and arms treaties around the world. This and the fact that we haven’t filled many of the diplomatic posts around the world has led to our shrinking influence on the global stage. Plus, get this, the ambassador to South Africa is a lady who designs handbags and is a member of Trump’s Mar A-lago crowd. Great.

The stock market is in the dumper.

We have done nothing to protect our electoral process, and we are now hearing reports of voting machines switching votes thus undermining what electoral integrity we used to have. That is, what hasn’t been already undermined by the Republican gerrymandering, voter suppression and shutting down of polling places.

Now we have a shooting in a synagogue. What does our president suggest was the problem? That there wasn’t an armed guard there to return fire. This suggests that every place of worship should have armed guards ready to shoot? What could go wrong? I mean let’s give religious people the idea that they need to protect themselves from “the others.” Gee, has that led to problems in the past? Well, yeah, like most of history. I mean what is history but one long description of one group trying to impose their religious beliefs on another via force?

The only respite in Europe came at the end of The Hundred Years war when thirty different parties got together and negotiated for five years to end the thing. Why? Why did they get together to end it? And why weren’t the two most powerful forces on the European continent involved in that peace process? Interesting questions. The other players in Europe, the ones doing all the fighting were exhausted. The German principalities and the Polish plains areas were tired of one army or another sweeping over them and killing everyone who wasn’t on their side. The Pope and The Holy Roman Emperor were all for continuing. I mean why not? They weren’t doing the actual fighting. They were just whipping the masses into a frenzy to keep fighting. Protestant versus Catholic and all that. Finally, all the little people got together and hammered out a peace.

But we’re better than that right? Yeah, our president suggests it’s the victims’ fault. That they should have been armed. Don’t you want to go to church and see a couple of good Christian people standing at the doors with semi-automatic weapons ready to kill any infidel that might come near? How about them mosques? Or the ashrams? Or some temples? I mean freedom of religion means freedom for anyone to carry a firearm anywhere, am I right?

We gotta protect ourselves from those other people. Right? Right?

This isn’t “God Help Us.”

This is “We Gotta Help Ourselves.”

And the president in a quiet voice saying the usual hateful things he yells from his lectern at those rallies ain’t cutting it.

Moving on, to little tidbits I have learned:

The man who won the Nobel prize for figuring out how T-Cells work to stop cancer has played blues harp with Willie Nelson.

The reason Neville Chamberlain gave in to Hitler and let him take part of Czechoslovakia was that the day before 300 German speaking people were killed in Czechoslovakia and Hitler said he had to get in there to protect the remaining German speaking folks in that country. Chamberlain said okay. The 300 people killed was all bullshit. It was PR on German radio. Pure propaganda.

The Czech Republic has the town of Terezin. A medieval walled town the Nazis took over and kicked everyone out to use it as a poster child for what the relocation of Jews would look like. They had an orchestra and a choir and the Nazis took photos to use as propaganda to convince others to move peacefully. There were sinks in a long row to show that everyone could wash together. The sinks never worked. They were just to convince the Red Cross everything was hunky-dory. The gang showers worked. It was the same set up as the ones at the extermination camps, except the extermination camp shower rooms had no windows.

The guitarist on David Bowie’s CD “Let’s Dance” was none other than Stevie Ray Vaughn.

Who knew?

Early voting is seeing numbers twice what they were in the 2014 mid-term election. Democrats are urging people to vote early because of Republican efforts to throw people off voting rolls. The idea being that if you were removed from the voting roll you have time to fix it before the polls close on election day.

Voting is up in Delaware, Indiana, Minnesota, Tennessee, Maryland, North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Florida, and Nevada. This has Republicans worried. They may have to turn to actually changing the votes in the machines to steal some of these elections. Suppression and creating near impossible situations for people to vote may not be enough.

Did you hear about the mainly Spanish speaking county in Kansas? Yeah, I know, right? The supervisor of the election there moved the polling place out of town. Far away from public transportation. The usual rule of thumb for the number of people you need to have a voting place is 1200. This county has 13,000 people and they have one polling place! That wasn’t bad enough. They moved it out of town. The supervisor has been appealed to to open the old voting place in town. She didn’t respond to the request, but she did send the request along with her “LOL” comment to the Secretary of State Kris Kobach, Mr. “Operation Crosscheck”, and candidate for governor. Must be nice to know that they are doing everything they can to screw you over.

If we can’t cut you off the rolls, we can make it take hours and hours to vote in a remote location, and if that doesn’t work we’ll change your vote in the server. Trust me.

Wine and Rum

There was also a tidbit that a security guy bought two voting machines off eBay for $100 each. That was in 2014. He found that the data from the last election was still on them, which made it even easier that normal to figure out how to diddle the names and votes. Not that it was hard mind you. Nothing was encrypted and there were no real safeguards to getting into the machine. Alarmed he bought two more machines from the 2016 election. Surely things had been fixed. Nope. Situation normal.

Meanwhile, even with Congress not in session somehow judges are still being put in place. The Federalist Society is a conservative group and their list is where all the judges are being selected. These people are out of touch with regular Americans. This will screw up our lives for my foreseeable lifetime.

Candy!

President Obama has taken to the stump. He said that when a Republican says he’s for protecting
pre-existing conditions yet has voted against it consistently and might also be in favor of a current lawsuit that wants to strip away pre-existing conditions that person is lying. I wish this guy would have just stuck to being President.

Arianna Grande broke up with Pete Davidson for a pig. Yeah, you heard me. She likes her pet pig better than Pete. Somehow it seems right and it’s the kind of thing that would only happen to Pete.

Have a nice day! Please tip the armed personnel protecting you from “the others” on the way out.

Well well well they caught a man whom they believe to have sent the bombs. His fingerprint was on a package sent to Maxine Waters. His DNA is on some of the bomb stuff. He’s a white 56 year old who has been living in his van. Before that he was living with his mom. His van is covered with stickers about Trump, he has stickers with Hillary in cross hairs. Some of the Republicans say that this is a hoax. The FBI says that these were bombs, not hoaxes.

Self-Portrait with Sunglasses(Not me, Alex Katz, 1969)

The president was not able to bring himself to thanking the FBI (or Maxine Waters – ha ha). Trump read off a teleprompter and sounded presidential for four hours until he was again at a microphone. Then it was in the White House in the room where Kennedy laid in state – kind of holy ground for those who have worked in the White House – where he attacked CNN and the crowd chanted “Lock Her Up” and “CNN Sucks.” Trump also went on that he was the one who, more than anyone else, was being attacked.

Later there were news stories about the arrest of people in California and on the east coast who have gone to Trump rallies with the specific intent on beating up protestors. They beat them up, then post their exploits on neo-nazi sites and facebook. There are those on the right who say there’s violence on both sides. Yeah? I don’t remember Hillary having supporters that acted like storm troopers. This is new. This is like Hitler and the brown shirts.

I talked with a fellow who was on one of my archaeological tours who said his grandparents were in Germany when Hitler was coming to power. He said they all knew Hitler was crazy, but when they decided to act; it was too late. Let’s not make the same mistake.

Get out and vote. We need to get rid of these people, these sympathizers, and these people trying to subvert our democracy. Yes, there are Russians and other foreign interest groups, but let’s be clear. Most of the terror attacks have come from Americans. The president has encouraged and laid fallow ground for this sort of stuff. It needs to be stopped.